For two and a half weeks in Spring 2026, USC’s Fisher Museum of Art displayed a 1787 secret printing of the Constitution and a 1789 Senate markup of the Bill of Rights. Though it was only one stop on an eight-city Freedom Plane National Tour honoring the United States’ 250th anniversary, USC was the only college campus selected to host a stop in the tour. 

After the announcement, the CEO of the National Archives Foundation anticipated the exhibit would ignite a spark for the next generation to carry the nation’s founding ideals forward to write the following chapters of the American story. 

USC serving as a laboratory for democratic practice is aspirational. In practice, though, the torch is all we’re offered, not the flame. We are only offered sentiment, not solutions.

If we look at yet another institution’s founding story, we find even more guidance on enacting change: This very university began as somewhat of a radical experiment. 

In 1880, a project broke ground on the soil we now reside on, a mustard field in a city with no paved streets, electric lights or telephones. With 53 students and 10 teachers, USC was founded through the collaboration of Ozro Childs, the Protestant horticulturist; John Downey, the Irish-Catholic former governor; and Isaias Hellman, the German-Jewish banker. Initially created as an interfaith, frontier-era civic experiment, USC’s emergence as a ground for intellectual gatherings and a cultural bellwether disrupted the old-money Ivy League continuity. 

Today, despite our cultural and political milestones, if you were to conduct a brief internet scan of the best political science programs in America, USC would not make the cut, outcompeted by some of our West Coast rivals and other traditional Northeast liberal arts colleges. Nevertheless, USC’s history provides something unique that none of its peers, which are temporally closer to the American Revolution and its traditional principles of consent of the governed, can. Our past should inform our future.

Unfortunately, politics has turned into pageantry. Ever since the White House sidelined the congressionally chartered, nonpartisan America250 commission to launch its own brand of festivities, the tacky attractions, excessive, taxpayer-funded displays and Trump’s personal branding have not resonated with our generation and fail to deliver the same patriotic effects they may have intended. But there are many more founding stories to remember beyond the one commonly championed by the masses, such as how our very own alma mater came to be. 

So, how do we pick up where we left off and apply what we’ve learned? 

We could show up to the commemorations, feel the appropriate awe and let ourselves be recognized as physical embodiments of hope. Or, we could decline the provocation and label the whole production as pageantry. And yet, both actions reflect only limited foresight about our future. 

Or, we could do something about it.

The standard narrative we hear these days is that young people are inactive, even though the data suggests otherwise: According to CivicScience, a consumer analytics platform, 69% of Americans aged 18 to 29 identify as volunteers, motivated by both personal values and community impact. This number reflects a significant spike from the 57% recorded two years ago and is the highest among any generation in the country. The youth’s enthusiasm toward services is not a coincidence. 

The revelation is clear: We have not disengaged entirely; rather, we have learned to scale down civic life so we can watch it function in real time without being attached to the ineffective aspects of policy execution.

A plane full of documents from Washington is the least persuasive object our generation could be handed. The real thought-provoking lens invites us to look in a mirror, where reading our institutional history may be instrumental in answering this question. 

The founders of this university used their actions to answer an existential question confronting Americanism. By incorporating and chartering a new set of rules through an unlikely coalition, they operated a handful of small classrooms that gradually evolved into a trustworthy enterprise.

While we inherit a nation with substantial damages seemingly beyond repair, we also inherit something more useful than a torch: The embodied knowledge that, like our founders, we too can play by a new set of rules. 

Entering another ordinary semester following the anniversary, we should take advantage of every opportunity of self-governance we have, incentivized by the messages delivered by our USC founders that still echo through the halls.